1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to an electronic apparatus with a dictionary function and a computer-readable medium including a control program for the apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, an electronic dictionary apparatus with various foreign-language dictionaries has become popular.
The basic requirements for language learners (especially middle-level learners) to make progress in foreign languages lie in learning grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation.
When a person memorizes words as part of vocabulary learning, he or she must memorize not only the words but also various inflections, conjugations, and declensions. French, German, Italian, Spanish, and the like conjugate more highly than English.
For example, in the case of a French verb, its spelling changes according to person, number, mood, tense, voice, and the like.
Accordingly, in a language whose verb conjugate highly, it is particularly important to learn how a desired verb conjugates.
Printed dictionaries and some electronic dictionary apparatuses have conjugation charts where conjugations have been organized in tabular form. Referring to the conjugations of the desired verb in the charts can be said to be an effective learning technique.
However, to refer to the conjugation charts with such dictionaries, the user had to visually confirm the conjugations of a verb and search for the appropriate conjugational chart, which was troublesome.
To overcome this drawback, an electronic dictionary apparatus capable of displaying a list of conjugations of a specified verb has been considered.
With a conventional electronic dictionary apparatus, conjugation database which caused the base form of a word to correspond to each of the conjugations for each of the verbs included in a dictionary database was stored, thereby enabling a list of the conjugations of a specified verb to be displayed.
Consequently, in the conventional electronic dictionary apparatus, the burden of developing a conjugation database was great and a large data capacity was needed. In addition, conjugation charts could not be displayed.